In rugby, scrum is when the team comes together to restart the game. In agile project management, scrum means small teams working together to work through issues.
At Cornell Tech, scrum means progress, collaboration and integration.
Part of the Startup Studio practicum, scrum is a weekly breakout session where small groups of student companies discuss their challenges and successes facilitated by a scrum lead. Last semester scrum leads were Irving Fain, founder of CrowdTwist, Aaron Holiday, co-founder at 645 Ventures, and Leland Rechis, who has worked on product at Twitter, Etsy, and Kickstarter.
Progress
Startup Studio teams are tasked with building a company in roughly four months. Weekly progress is key to completing their goals and scrum helps keep them on track and hold teams accountable for their progress.
“The scrum is one of the weekly studio features that makes sure teams are moving forward and making progress and being honest with themselves and their team,” Holiday explained.
Rachel Wang, MBA ‘15 and co-founder of Epicure, feels scrum helped her team focus, providing a “method to the madness.” “I appreciate being able to see that we’re focused on being able to accomplish this concept [in any given week],” Wang said.
Collaboration
Scrum also encourages collaboration between teams and scrum leads.
Leads have experience in the startup world, whether it be founding a startup, investing in startups, or working closely with successful and growing tech companies.
Fain believes scrum leads help to bring a new perspective to students at Cornell Tech. “It’s been fun for me to bring my perspective into the classroom and help to teach based on real life experience —both the mistakes I’ve made and the things I’ve done right,” Fain said.
Integration
One of Cornell Tech’s missions is to bridge the gap between industry and academics. Scrum allows students to develop their startups within an academic setting.
At schools like Stanford, Harvard and MIT, startup activity “is not tightly coupled or integrated within the curriculum,” Holiday explained. “As demand shifts for entrepreneurship and the cost to build software comes down, I think it’s important for startup formation to actually be a part of one’s academic experience.”
